Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Produce, or lack thereof

I’ve become hooked on the Planet Organics produce. I confess to being completely agog at the difference; I mean, I knew that I served up a lot fewer vegetables than my mother did (and felt kind of guilty about it), but I couldn’t blame my children for professing undying hatred of the things. They were just plain yucky.

I didn’t want them either. Green stuff that could be zucchini, or might also be cooked cucumber, or perhaps it was…some other…squash-like substance…after a while, I too started to dislike them and slowly, just stopped buying them altogether except on those rare occasions when I’d happen to be someplace with a decent farmer’s market.

Our town’s farmer’s market is opening this weekend, so I’m hoping to be able to get decent local produce soon.

Hoping, but not expecting.

Our farmer’s market has always been double-l-lame. Last year, we had anything you wanted as long as all you wanted was bok choy or strawberries. Or apricots that looked as if they’d been picked at the height of fermentation. Oh! And there was this one guy who had baskets of blackberries. And really messed up hands (scratches, band-aids, scrapes clear up to his earlobes), which inexplicably cracked me up. Perhaps it was PTSD from all the times I took a header into the brambles myself while trying to fill pails with the @*^&@ing things.

The ‘best’ blackberries were always out on the water. The ‘dry land accessible’ bushes tended to be picked clean, but if you got out in a boat and went ‘shore crawling’, you could get some of the biggest, juiciest, most delicious blackberries ever.

That was because nobody else would get out there after the things, because invariably some braying jackass would come flying along at 35 knots (in a ‘no wake zone’, naturally) and send you flying into the @*^&@ing brambles. My personal favorite was the time I was in the stupid crawdad boat with a big pail of blackberries and a rather precarious perch, leaning waaaaaaaay out because the levee rocks were kind of ‘shelved’, and some twit in a ski boat came flying through the marina (MARINA, HELLO) and the crawdad went baaaaawooooop! and tossed me literally and bodily into the brambles. Which then clung to me with a million tiny sharp fingers while the @*^&@ing wasps expressed their displeasure with my party-crashing.

Oh yeah. Good times. Goooooooooood times…yup, those were the days when I developed my preference for the ‘breathable fabric’ style band-aid…but I digress. Where was I, anyway? Oh yeah. Produce, lack thereof… Zucchini! Zucchini was a no-show! Come ON, how in the world do you go through an entire season at a farmer’s market without anybody hawking zucchini? Zucchini is, like, a farm weed! Every farm seems to have it! Worse than crabgrass! Everywhere and producing like skinny green legless rabbits with seeds!

But no zucchini at our farmer’s market.

However, if you would like to purchase anything from Mary Kay, Avon, Pampered Chef, or perhaps you were more in the mood for extremely large and cheap-looking handbags with sequins glued on them or t-shirts with slogans sure to offend somebody, we’ve gotcha covered.

**sigh**

ANYWAY. There’s a new outfit running the show this year, so I’m hopeful. If they can actually manage to provide, you know, edible produce, I’ll consider dropping my Planet Organics box.